Taiwan’s largest ground-level solar farm, a 181-megawatt (MW) project in Tainan’s Cigu District (七股), joined the nation’s electricity grid at the end of last month, state-run Taiwan Sugar Co (Taisugar, 台糖) said yesterday.
By the end of the year, the company plans to expand the project to provide up to 216MW of electricity, the equivalent of 300 million kilowatt hours per year, or the equivalent of the annual electricity consumption of 83,000 homes, Taisugar said in a press release.
The Cigu solar project sits on 189 hectares of land deemed “not suitable for cultivation” by Taisugar, it said.
Photo courtesy of Taiwan Sugar Co
After a bidding process in 2019, the tender for the project went to Chung-hsin Electric and Machinery Manufacturing Corp (中興電工).
It is the first — but not the last — Taisugar green power project built on land not suitable for farming, it said.
“We hope to repeat the formula for other suitable parcels [of land] owned by Taisugar,” it said, without elaborating.
Taiwan’s sugarcane trade once flourished and sugar was a major export. Taisugar, established in 1946 by the government, has diversified into various businesses, including a chain of convenience stores, hog farming, floriculture and biotechnology, as the cost structure of domestic sugar production waned in the past few decades.
Turning agricultural land into solar farms has been controversial in Taiwan, with some arguing that it needs to be preserved for food security reasons.
However, the Cigu lot was not under cultivation and could not be brought under cultivation, easing its transition into a solar farm, Taisugar said.
“The land used in the solar project suffered from subsidence and salt contamination, and struggled to support sugar cane, as well as other crops,” Taisugar said.
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